Opinion: Life as a Target

Attacks on my work aimed at undermining climate change science have turned me into a public figure. I have come to embrace that role.

By Michael E. Mann | March 27, 2013

Michael Mann testifying before Congress, with National Academy of Science Chair Ralph Cicerone (July 27, 2006)NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCESAs a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked. Politicians have demanded I be fired from my job because of my work demonstrating the reality and threat of human-caused climate change. I’ve been subjected to congressional investigations in the pay of the fossil fuel industry and was the target of what TheWashington Post referred to as a “witch hunt” by Virginia’s reactionary Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. I have even received a number of anonymous death threats. My plight is dramatic, but unfortunately, it is not unique; climate scientists are regularly the subject of such attacks. This cynicism is part of a destructive public-relations campaign being waged by fossil fuel companies, front groups, and individuals aligned with them in an effort to discredit the science linking the burning of fossil fuels with potentially dangerous climate change.

My work first appeared on the world stage in the late 1990s with the publication of a series of articles estimating past temperature trends. Using information gathered from records in nature, like tree rings, corals, and ice cores, my two coauthors and I had pieced together variations in the Earth’s temperature over the past 1,000 years. What we found was that the recent warming, which coincides with the burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution, is an unprecedented aberration in this period of documented temperature changes, and recent work published in the journal Science suggests that the recent warming trend has no counterpart for at least the past 11,000 years, and likely longer. In a graph featured in our manuscript, the last century sticks out like the blade of an upturned hockey stick.

The graph, now known as the hockey-stick graph, has become an icon in the climate-change debate, providing potent, graphic evidence of human-caused climate change. As a result, the fossil fuel industry and those who do their bidding saw the need to discredit it in any way they could, and I have found myself at the receiving end of attacks and threats of investigations, as I describe in my recent book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. In 2003, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) denounced my work on the Senate floor and called me to testify to his committee under hostile questioning. Two years later, House Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) attempted to subpoena all of my emails and research documents from my entire career, and the correspondence and files of both my senior coauthors, presumably looking for some way to both intimidate and discredit me. Inhofe and Barton are two of the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the U.S. Congress. More recently, Ken Cuccinelli, the newly minted “Tea Party” Republican Attorney General of Virginia, took a page out of the same playbook, demanding all of my emails with 39 different scientists around the world from my time at the University of Virginia, claiming that he was investigating potential state fraud.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, and on right-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to fossil fuel interests like ExxonMobil or the petrochemical tycoons, the Koch Brothers. As the journal Nature put it a March 2010 editorial, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the accepted scientific evidence simply because it is inconvenient for some who are profiting from fossil fuel use.

But being the focus of such attacks has a silver lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I have come to embrace this role, choosing to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change. Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism, in reality the evidence for human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, where those gases are acting like a heat-trapping blanket around the planet. And storms like Superstorm Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the unprecedented heat, drought, and wild fires of last summer are the effects.

If we continue down this path, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet—one with more extreme heat, more pronounced and widespread drought, worse episodes of flooding, and greater competition for diminishing water, food, and land. Greater competition for diminishing resources at a time of growing global population, in turn, is a recipe for a national security nightmare. The worst thing we can do is bury our heads in the sand and pretend that climate change doesn’t exist. We must take action now to preserve a habitable climate for years to come.

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The effects of anthropogenic climate change is getting harder and harder to deny. For example, the ice-sheet in the Arctic is disappearing in an alarming rate, much faster than what anyone would have believed a few years ago.

In a few years time, we will look back and wonder "what were we thinking?" when we realize that we have acted way too late and way too little.

That is, unless people start listening to the science, and to experts like you.

My gratitude is immeasurable to Michel Mann, and others who speak truth to power today. A large percentage of our elected officials are corrupted by donations and monetary advantages and favors of many (often well-laundered) kinds, from interests that put profit above everything and everyone. From the cigarette manufacturers' war and the McCarthy hearings, to todays attacks on those who would dare relate realities about the 400 billion per years siphoned off healthcare finance by the health insurance sector, to those who would break up the megabanks, to those who would cite damage done by the BP oil spill... to Michael Mann... there is a constant elevation escalation in the misuse of the power of wealth: to misinform, to manufacture polarized hatred of citizen against citizen, to villify fact revealers, to intimdate and bring harm to those who dare tell the facts as they are about ANYTHING inconvenient to big money.

Promotions at the highest levels of power inside and outside government increasingly tend to float to the top those least hampered by conscience or by ethical constraints, and who are most skilled and most motivated at attacking anything and anybody who gets in the way of big money.

Words cannot express the measure of my gratitude to those who have the courage and the reslience to continue the brash insult of simply telling facts as they are.

Michael--thank you. You are not a drama queen as one refered, but a scientist who has a conscience and recognizes the importance of translating science in a way that the public can understand.

There have been other scientists in the past who have recognized that just stating data, using terms in a manner that the science community uses them, will not help policy makers or the public understand the science.

We need clearer statements by scientists as to the choices we are making. For example, if we increase windmills and chop up birds and bats, will that be off-set by saving species by reducing climate change overall? Will that be offset by reducing the number of bird/bat deaths from oil rigs and habitat distruction from mountain topping? At what point do conservationist need to, if at all, recognize that habitat will be disrupted by increasing renewables--but that it is necessary to save the greater habitat and planet--if that is true.

We need more scientists clarifying what happens when we continue to climb the "hockey stick" to the habitats that people want to save so that they can better understand what will happen if we don't take action--and when we take action.

The only evidence that carbon dioxide is causing climate warming comes from computer models that were designed to attribute warming to carbon dioxide. The models are little more than exercises in numerical curve fitting; they contain upwards of 2-dozen arbitrary parameters, the values of none of which has basis in observational science. The models have failed to ever make an accurate prediction of 5-years into the future; the current temperature is below the 90% confidence limit of the model projections. There has been no significant warming for at least 15-years.

All of the observational evidence contradicts the bases of the models. There is no tropospheric hot spot, the high altitudes and high lattitudes are not warming faster than the temperates zones, the concentation of water vapor is not rising rapidly as the models demand.

All analyses of historical data compared to present conditions finds no evidence of an increase in the frequency or severity of storms. The rate of sea level rise has not changed since the late 18th century. Apparently, the warming that we are seeing is a continuing rebound from the relatively low temperatures during the Little Ice Age. Present-day temperatures are lower than they were during the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warm Period.

There is no evidence that the climate of today is unusual or that carbon dioxide has caused the warming.

I feel that the debate on global warming pits scientists and those who believe in fact and evidence against those who have vested economic interests in the status quo. The latter people may be those in certain industries (oil, gas), people in the pockets of those industries (politicians), or those folks who simply don't want some nebulous governmental or non-govermental body telling them how to live their lives or pay something when they don't want to. Some people are truly evil, but most are just following their instincts.

Things, however, viewed from all sides, need to change. But, how? Where? Why? I feel that if an economic advantage of changing the way we do things (drill, mine, and burn) can be presented, then a real paradigm shift in the way everything is thought about regarding global warming will occur. Wait, you say, we've hard all of that before, but its fallen flat. Yes, certain renewable energy schemes (solar, wind, tides) have illustrated their lack of abilities to keep up with the global demand for more power. All of the models have shown it. And, maintaining the way we currently utilize fossil fuel is a biosphere catastrophe. Close to 99+% of scientists confirm it. We need to go somewhere else. Nuclear uranium-235 electrical generation plants are provide safe, reliable energy if they are not placed in earthquake or tsunami zones. Still, even with those disasters, the loss of human and animal life is hard to document. Unfortunately, the supply of fuel is low, with a poor future of finding enough to get us out of our energy situation.

That leaves only one potential fix, one that worked and was dropped close to half a century ago, thorium slow breeder reactors. Designed back in the 1960's, this technology uses safe, reliable, plentiful radioactive thorium to breed uranium-233. That uranium isn't used for bombs (and that is why it probably got very short shrift during the Cold War), and the fuel is almost completely consumed, which is very, very different from current uranium fuel rods. Thorium is so plentiful, dozens train boxcars filled with it are buried in the U.S. desert as metal refining waste. It is stated that we have enough thorium in the U.S. today to generate enough electricity to last us 20,000 years. This is no joke. Google it yourself. If the current economic interests can be shifted in a different direction, we can have our cake (plentiful cheap energy) and eat it too (global temperature normalcy). There needs to be a push by everyone on all sides to jump on this economic solution as soon as possible. Our planet and our wallets depend on it.

I think that you are completly wrong when you feel that those who tout carbon dioxide-induced climate change are basing their opinions on fact-based science. They actually are basing their opinions on the output of unreliable computer models. All observational data plainly show that the carbon dioxide-induced warming hypothesis has failed to describe reality and that the models have zero predictive value.

Few, if any of the skeptics that I know of have vested interests in any fossil fuel industry. Roy Spencer works for NASA, Robert Ball is a college professor, Pat Michaels works for a think tank that receives only a miniscule fraction of its funding from Exxon/Mobil.

There is absolutely no evidence that the way we are using fossil fuels will ever contribute to a biosphere catastrohe. That statement is pure hyperbole.

Your statement that 99+ percent of scientists believe the IPCC position on global warming is nothing more than a fabrication created by Schneider and a couple of others and blasted from the rafters by the lame stream media appologists.

Thorium reactors are a possibility, but so is re-processing and re-use of the spent uranium that we are now storing uselessly at nuclear power plant sites. The re-processed uranium and the plutonium that we recover when we re-process the spent uranium fuel can both be used to generate electricity. We need only get over our paranoia about some genuinely evil persons stealing some of the plutonium for the purpose of making bombs. We could protect those reactors. I also think that your estimate of 20,000 years of electricity from thorium is on the high side. I have seen number in the range of 500 years from uranium and 1,000 years from thorium.

Our planet is not a sentient being and has no opinion about this issue.

I find this article absolutely disturbing. If you would have a look at the science and maths in Mann's papers, the critics, such as presented at climateaudit.org, are fully warranted. His conspiracy theories are disturbing. Some if his climategate emails are very disturbing.

The problem is almost entirely epistemological. Climate change scientists employ models. A model is not a theory in itself, just a simplified (deletion/change of a theory variable) or worse, an oversimplification (deletion/change in a theory constant) allowing a possible catastrophic reverse of theory cause and effect (since constants provide the frame of reference). Models can be used or misused. Their proper use is to more easily understand a complex theory, e.g. removing the coefficient of friction in Newtonian Mechanics via a cushion of air to more easily measure the conservation of momentum. An example of the misuse of a model is to substitute the model for the theory. The main epistemological difference between a model and the theory it was simplified/oversimplified from, is that only the theory can be falsified empirically since a model is already false. The solution for climate change scientists working with the theory of human induced climate change is to provide at least one falsifying observation taking care not to confuse a falsification with a non verification, i.e. not more and more verifications of their theory. To my knowledge not a single possible falsification has been provided by anybody. This has produced a typical political based syndrome that plagues climate change science. The scientific method has not changed; when unsure of causation Occam's Razor allows researchers to test the more simple theory firstly since this is the most efficient course of action. Applying the razor may well allow the favoured theory that the observed increase in co2 levels are mostly caused by human action allowing scientists to prudently assume human activity as causative but only on one condition: they work hard to falsify that theory. Of course and at all times the reverse proposition equally and oppositely applies no matter how nonsensical it may appear. Historical sun verses earth centric theories of the solar system underline this simple but often forgotten point. If the science has not yet reached the point where a secure falsification can be offered then more resources must be dedicated to finding one since a single possible empirical falsification is is worth a billion verifications. IOW those who are testing the theory of human induced climate change must also represent the theories greatest skeptic; clearly this is not the case. Indeed the term "skeptic" is today, vilified. My criticisms of climate change scientists, like many modern scientists working in other fields, is their apparent disregard for falsifiability. This is linked to today's Post Modernism that refuses to separate a falsification from just a non verification. It was Aristotle who provided a secure way to separate them via his Traditional Square Of Opposition employed as non empty, i.e. the I proposition "some S are P" (S represents the subject and P the predicate) is not empty meaning at least one S has been empirically observed where S is always a deduction from P. The A,E,I,O proposition types that form the four corners of the square allow two possible falsifications via two diagonals. For human induced climate change A is falsified by O, i.e. the A proposition that all the significant co2 increases are human (A) is empirically falsified by the observation that some significant co2 increases are not human (O). The E proposition, no significant increases in Co2 are observed human is only a non verification since nobody can validly claim to have observed and measured all human Co2 production (the problem of induction). The same problem of induction is provided by A but solved via O which represents the only proposition in the square with a different predicate. IOW, O stands for an A in a different square representing a contesting theory. Therefore the falsification of one theory is always the verification of a contesting theory underlying the basic nature of falsifiability for the evolution of theory.

Massive peat bogs, containing long frozen methane located in the upper Scandinavin areas, once starting to defrost will evolve climate changing gasses on a continuing basis into a run-away release. Once this starts, there may be no way to shut it off. Since this is already going on, controls are critical. It will be interesting to see how the super rich who are in denial will cope with this.

It is unfortunate that the debate has become so strident and ugly. Like many I am deeply concerned about the unsustainably heavy human footprint on the environment, our relentless exploitation of limited resources for agriculture and settlement, and mining for energy and materials, and I presume, I am sure correctly, that these same concerns motivate to greater or lesser extent people like Michael Mann, and that this is one reason why Mann and others agitate for internationally co-ordinated action.

However, one does not need a higher degree in science to see that Mann's- IPCC-predicted relationship between CO2 and temperature has not been confirmed empirically. Taken together with the knowledge that our Earth has often been hotter when CO2 was lower or cooler when CO2 was higher and one can deduce that it is all a bit more complicated. On this point, even James Hansen the father of anthropogenic climate warming alarm admits that temperature goes up before atmospheric carbon dioxide rises. Any causality is back-to-front!

Repetition by Mann of the oft-made nonsense assertion that there is scientific consensus about the cause of global warming, does not make the hypothesis true.

I agree that science is not about consensus; it is an exacting process that lets nature tell us an evolving truth. Because we are a tribal animal we have a tendency to please tribal leaders, i.e. we are biased towards established views. I stress that the ugly politics that surrounds climate science is not unlike what Galilleo had to put up with. Politics has become inevitable because empirical falsifiability has been removed from this debate via both sides using Post Modern epistemology.

I have 2 problems with this article, and Mann's work. By way of background, I am a physician and cancer biologist.

1) Mann, and other climate scientists, state predicitons as certainties. But, like economists, they do no well controlled experiments. They make predictions based on models that are difficult to verify. It is not that they are necessarily bad scientists, it is simply the nature of the beast. For instance, if I predict that adding 300ppm of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere will lead to an average global temp rise of 1.5 degree C in 30 years, that is a truly difficult prediction to test, and simply cannot be tested in isolation from other events (volcanoes producing soot that darken the earth, sunspots, and other unknown "natural" fluctuations in the earth's temp). But if i say adding 1L of NaOH to 1L of HCl will produce a solution of pH 7, i can test my prediction quickly and simply. So one problem is the way many climate scientists convey information that is truly unknowable as definitive.

2) My second problem is with the "hockey stick". Basically, mann and colleagues produced a graph that mixes measured temps (after ~1850) with estimated/predicted temps (before ~1850). But it turns out they used the same model to produce estimated temps up to the 1990s. But the estimated temps didnt' agree with the measured temps. So they simply ignored this discrepancy, blamed it on the rate of tree growth changing, Instead of trying to fix their model. Apparently, this is an acceptable way to report climate science; it seems like borderline fraud to me (especially when combined with the "trick" and "hide the decline"). Its as if I did a study of mRNA expression. The first bit of the study I used Northern blots and densitometry to quantify; the second bit I used RNA-seq. Then combined the two into one graph. I think thats a bit sketchy in the first place, but OK. However, when I obtain densitometry data for the RNA-seq samples, and they dont' agree with the densitometry, then I would find out why they dont' agree (definitively, not possibly/maybe/hypothetically), or not publish the composite.

The following should really be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to discuss this topic:

I think the content of this article demonstrates a paranoid mindset from Dr Mann.

There is no credible evidence, that I have seen, to link the skeptic views expressed by many doubters to the fossil fuel industry. The problem with Dr Mann is that his science has simply not been able to withstand the harsh light of public scrutiny.

The hockey stick for which he has become famous, indeed the only thing for which he has become famous, is an artifact of statistical techniques which no self respecting engineer, like myself, would give the slightest credence to.

It is very regrettable that a branch of science has allowed the scientific method to become so corrupted as to facilitate the space where the hockey stick that Dr Mann clings to assiduously still informs any part of the serious debate on climate.

We only have to look at Dr Mann's unswerving support for a recent publication by Shakun et al, itself another statistical artifact of data torture, to see that intelectual and scientific rigour is not Dr Mann's strong point.

I agree with Hs, something is very wrong with this comment system. For one, it does not accept replies to specific articles. Second, it did not post everything that I wrote (perhaps that is editorial discretion, :-) but I think not.) It sometimes posts immediately, sometimes it takes much longer.

Politicians, for the most part, are public servants, not scientists nor authorities on anything in particular. Human nature seems to require the pain resulting from denial as the motivating force for change.

For the record, I am fully aware that man made global warming is real and a real problem and I am completely furious that Mann, through his irresponsible self-pity, extending to lying on a libel suit, is going to discredit it in the public eye for a long time.
Take this:

"and storms like Superstorm Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the unprecedented heat, drought, and wild fires of last summer are the effects."
Except that we cannot attribute the hurricanes to manmade global warming according to one of the two most prominent journals on the planet. Nice going, Mann. Keep it up like this in court and it'll be the middle of the century before we can discuss this subject sanely in the public sphere.

There is nothing unprecedented about recent events. The 1950s was a decade known for hot summers, cold winters, drought and east coast hurricanes. The 1950s saw a three years drought that affected a larger area of the United States than the current drought. 1954 saw three Cat 3 hurricanes hit the east coast. One of these, Hazel, hit during a full moon and combined with a cold front just like Sandy. But Sandy was no longer hurricane strength when it hit the US. It was a post tropical cyclone. New York saw much stronger storms back in 1821 and 1938.

Decade of irresponsible forest management is to blame for the massive fires that are commonplace today. Fighting every fire has left the forest floor littered with fuel.

So if fewer and weaker storms like irene and Sandy, a less extensive drought, and ill managed forests are signs of man made climate change then please explain how the natural events of the 1950s were more frequent and more severe?

I have seen the graphs of the CO2 and the temeperature graphs and the land ice decrease.over the last 100+ years. That is not "computer models". It is reality.

With the increasing lucrative fracking big oils is obviously mobilising paid "sceptics" as never before. Mann wrote "front groups". He could have written "mostly paid front groups for the oil companies. Of course there are aome fanatics among the sceptics who are mere "believers" as well.

That it is getting colder in the polar regins now is a natural effect of the warm salt water current sinking at lower latitudes bringing a lot of the heat down into the depths of the oceans instead of warming the poles. This means colder poles and hotter equator areas, polarization of temperatures means increased cool down and worse weather. A different(?) type of ice age as the earth is balancing the extra heat, now as so many times before. The ice history is very clear on that ice ages were often preceded by brief periods of excessive heating, as if the feed back system to keep from runaway is very strong. But naturally the worse off course we go the greater the "backlash". Great Work by Mann. Keep it up!

Today's climate change controversy brings into sharp focus the inadequacy of today's epistemology. Only a generation ago there would not have been such a amazing level of disharmony within the scientific establishment since only one question needs to be asked that is not being asked today: what observation of nature do I need to make to falsify :-

Climate change is happening.

Human co2 is the primary cause.

Modern science has retreated from falsifiability often replacing science with just tautological (logically circular) mathematics. These models are misused if they replace the theory they were simplified/oversimplified from. It is defined constants within a mathematical representation of a theory that provides a critical, falsifiable frame of reference for proposed theory variables since they alone can set limits to these variables. Proving that constant is only a variable provides falsifiability. Allowing tautological models to replace a theory allows a catastrophic reversal of theory cause and effect.

Dr. Mann's fraudulent "data" will not deter Global Cooling as the cold winters and springs around the world demonstrate. Yes, its time for the next Ice Age and that phenomenon is driven by solar activity, not humans.

Some compare denying so-called AGW to denying the "holocaust", both events suspect upon investigation of the forensic evidence.

Perhaps the best indication of this modern-day "phlogiston" is the fact that the proposed "solution" is to create a market out of thin air (literally) which will only enrich Al Gore and the monetary elite.

I do not expect many of you, dear readers, to progress this far in my message, for if you have, then you remain open to impartial discussion rather than the security of your research grants.